Posts from February 2010

February 26, 2010

After the previous version’s release, I took a break from reading on the iPhone and read everything on the Kindle. I learned that I much preferred pagination to scrolling — even tilt scrolling — and that pagination is part of what makes the Kindle reading experience so great. So I spent a long time experimenting with different methods to bring pagination to the iPhone, and I finally found a solution that, while simplistic, allows any mix of pagination and scrolling in the dynamic web content that Instapaper is ideal for reading. I now prefer pagination to tilt scrolling. You can toggle between them with the Pagination switch in the Settings screen.

I like this. I've been reading a lot of books on the iPhone Kindle app, so I've gotten really used to its pagination interface vs the scrolling interface that Instapaper's historically had. A couple of days ago while reading an article in Instapaper, I realized that I'm constantly trying to scroll exactly one page's worth at a time. Which is... distracting.

The recent return of absinthe to the market has renewed interest in the early Herbsaint, and with assistance from Houston-based Herbsaint collector Jay Hendrickson (profiled by Robert Simonson in the March/April issue of Imbibe), Sazerac is releasing a version of Herbsaint made from the 1930s formula, complete with a label based on the original.

Michael Arrington writes this morning that Amazon is looking for ways to give free Kindles to all Amazon prime users:

In January Amazon offered select customers a free Kindle of sorts – they had to pay for it, but if they didn’t like it they could get a full refund and keep the device. It turns out that was just a test run for a much more ambitious program. A reliable source tells us Amazon wants to give a free Kindle to every subscriber.

Of the last nine books I've read, I've read eight of them on my iPhone using the Kindle app. As a matter of convenience, it's been pretty much perfect, compared to lugging books around.

But I don't think I'd necessarily want a free Kindle device; the marginal improvement to reading just doesn't seem worth it, and I'm not sure I'd want to lug it around, either. What I would love is a better experience for finding books to read (which, I think, is what Michael was also saying).